


Remade in Failure

by devilinthedetails



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Aging, Friendship, Gen, Grief, Healing, Loss, Memory, New Beginnings, Treason, failure - Freeform, mentoring, references to death, references to rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 11:33:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14019360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devilinthedetails/pseuds/devilinthedetails
Summary: Gareth and Wyldon speak after Wyldon resigns as training master. Set during Squire.





	Remade in Failure

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for discussion of death and rape. Please read with discretion. Thank you.

Remade in Failure

“I won’t reconsider.” Wyldon’s voice was flat as a stone eroded by centuries of water as Gareth appeared in his ajar office door. “If Your Grace has come to persuade me to stay on with the pages, your time would be better spent elsewhere.” 

Gareth said nothing. He just stood in the doorway like a sentry, his hand cupped around a cane instead of a scabbard. 

“That was discourteous.” Wyldon bowed his head in a gesture that was half apology and half invitation. “Forgive me, Your Grace. Come in and be seated.” 

After shutting the door, Gareth settled in a chair across from Wyldon’s desk that was not cluttered with objects Wyldon had set aside for packing in a crate. His knees creaked and his legs trembled even when he clutched the cane so tightly his knuckles blanched as he sat with more difficult and less dignity than he would have liked. Old age allowed few men dignity. At least Wyldon honored him by seeming to ignore his infirmity rather than scuttling forward to help him into the chair as an alarming number of people raced to do now. Gareth’s pride remained strong as his muscles had once been. 

“Your Grace is aware that I only took the post of training master at your request such is my respect for you and everything you taught me.” Wyldon quite properly didn’t sit until after Gareth had arranged himself. “I had no ambition for the position.” 

“I appreciate that.” Gareth had understood for fifteen years that his appeal had done what a king’s had failed to accomplish. He hadn’t been surprised to succeed where Jon had failed. Gareth had trained Wyldon and knew what virtues—honor, duty, a sense of enduring tradition—to appeal to in order to transform Wyldon’s reluctance into assent. 

“Yet I cannot stay even if you ask me to withdraw my resignation.” Wyldon’s gaze locked on Gareth’s. Gareth could see as clearly as if it were carved in stone that Wyldon wouldn’t reconsider any time before the world ended, but Gareth hadn’t expected otherwise and hadn’t come to urge Wyldon to do so. “I’ve failed in my duties. The only honorable course is to resign.” 

“You haven’t failed.” Even as he spoke, Gareth realized that Wyldon would never accept the truth of his words. When you were training master, every flaw in any of your students—whether page, squire, or knight—became an unflattering reflection of you and your training. Every death made you wonder what skill had been neglected or lesson hadn’t been taught. The boys how had broken in the Chamber would haunt Wyldon the way the ghost of Alex’s treason tormented Gareth, creeping up behind him, a chilling and invisible presence breathing down his neck in otherwise empty corridors. 

“Vinson of Genlith left the Chamber confessing to rape.” Wyldon’s fingers gripped his desk as though adrift at sea and in search of an anchor amidst tumultuous waves. “Even when he was confessing to his crimes, he blamed the victims instead of himself for the outrage he committed against them.” 

“We mentors sometimes take too much upon ourselves and forget that our students make their own choices and have the distressing tendency to disregard our commands and counsel.” Gareth sighed, feeling weary as his old bones. “I doubt you instructed the boy in rape.” 

“No.” Wyldon’s jaw clenched. “Obviously I didn’t instruct him sufficiently in chivalry, however. I gave daily lessons in weaponry but not chivalry. I taught him how to swing a staff and aim a lance but I never told him not to be a rapist.” 

“One would hope that such an instruction wouldn’t be necessary.” Gareth shifted his cane from one hand to the other. 

“One would hope,” agreed Wyldon, taut as a drawn bowstring, “but one would be disappointed in that hope.” 

“The disappointment is the Genlith boy.” Gareth didn’t need to add: not you. Wyldon would read the words written in his eyes. 

“Even if we absolve me of all blame with Vinson, there’s still Joren.” Wyldon scratched at his shoulder, itching an old wound to hide new ones. “He was so rigid that he shattered in the Chamber. That rigidity I hammered into the head of every lad—and the one girl—I taught. It was my rigidity in him that destroyed him.” 

“You aren’t so rigid as you think. If you were, you’d never have made so many changes to page training.” Gareth stared out the window into the wintry sky, thinking of former students who misread themselves or whom he misread. As he aged, time flowed together in his mind, the past streaming into the present in an unstoppable current. “Some people are just born so rigid, they would rather die than bend. One such was Alexander of Tirragen. My great swordsman, my great failure.” 

(In the frost on the window pane, Gareth could see the frozen breath his and Alex’s pants had made when they sat in a cold underground practice court after a bout that had made Gareth believe with each thrust of his sword that he had found the page who would replace him as Champion. Maybe it was that potential—so bright it might have blinded Gareth—that had prompted him to comment when he usually confined his corrections to fencing technique during these intensive private sessions, “I’m displeased that you interrupted Sir Myles’s class to debate the Code of Chivalry with him. You must learn not to rise to bait whenever it’s waved in front of your nose.” 

“Your displeasure was plain when you assigned me an extra hour of ethics for a week.” Alex’s typically expressionless face had twisted. “This despite the fact that you also disagree with Sir Myles’s stance on the Code of Chivalry, Your Grace.” 

“I didn’t tell you that.” Gareth had shot Alex a glance as piercing as his blade. “I did tell you that I don’t want to hear of you arguing with him again in his own lessons.” 

“I did tell you that I didn’t think I could learn many lessons from the court drunk.” There had been scorn in Alex’s tone but Gareth had understood it was all for Sir Myles. 

“Sir Myles is your history master.” Gareth had arched a warning eyebrow. “You’ll speak of him with respect or receive an extra hour of etiquette every day for a week to improve your manners.” 

Alex had pressed his lips together—apparently he preferred silence to speaking of Sir Myles with respect—but his eyes had blazed with mutiny. 

“You’re too rigid, Alexander.” Gareth had hoped that his use of the boy’s full name would emphasize that he was serious as a grave. “You must learn to be more flexible or it’ll be the death of you.” 

“Flexibility is my strength, Your Grace.” Like a cat, Alex had contorted his spine into a shape that would have hurt anyone else to even look at. 

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.” Gareth had removed a sweaty fencing glove and hurled it at Alex’s ear although he had known the impudent lad would duck. He had only meant to capture Alex’s attention so the boy would listen when he went on, “If you aren’t flexible, you’ll fail, and I can’t fail with you.” 

“If I fail, I would’ve failed you, not the other way around.” A slight knot tied in Alex’s forehead. 

“The lesson isn’t what the mentor teaches.” Gareth had squeezed Alex’s shoulder. “It’s what the student learns. If the student doesn’t learn the right lesson, then the teacher has failed.” 

“I won’t fail you or me, Your Grace.” Alex’s chin had lifted. “I never fail.” 

“That’s what I worry about.” Gareth had frowned at Alex’s overconfidence. “If you don’t fail, you don’t learn. It’s our failures that shape us and make us grow—if we’re flexible, which is what you need to be.” 

“Yes, Your Grace.” Alex had sounded dutiful—as if he were humoring Gareth—instead of convinced, and sighing, Gareth had called out the beginning of another duel.) 

“Alexander of Tirragen.” Wyldon’s crisp words beckoned Gareth back to the present. “He died a traitor’s death many years ago now.” 

“I thought he might be the King’s Champion after me.” Gareth’s hands shook on his cane. He shouldn’t mourn a traitor, but he still felt a sense of loss—of a wasted life and potential—whenever he remembered Alexander of Tirragen. It wasn’t the traitor he grieved so much as the boy he had known—the sly smile he had worn when he bested a clever opponent and the gleam in his dark eyes when he mastered a deft maneuver. Old hearts like old bones were brittle and made for breaking. “Instead he was buried in rubble after betraying king and country.” 

“He made his own choices.” Wyldon, like Gareth, obviously found that easier to say than to believe. Of course, it was always simpler to dispense advice than to receive it. 

“I spent so much time with him one-on-one, but never learned my most important lessons.” There had been so many dawns when he had tangled blades with Alex in palace courtyards. 

(Perhaps it wasn’t shocking that he had fallen back into one of those mornings, the silver of his sword glittering like sun on snow as he rested it beneath a throbbing vein in Alex’s neck, concluding a duel where Alex had fought with a wild fury that had left him more vulnerable than powerful. 

“You lost because you lost control of yourself.” Gareth had kept his sword pointing at Alex’s throat to ensure he had the boy’s attention. “You’re ice, not fire. You fight best when you’re focused, not when you’re angry.” 

“That’s not what you say to Alan.” Alex’s eyes had narrowed to suspicious slits. “He told me you said he fights best when he’s on fire, Your Grace.” 

“Is Alan your teacher or am I?” Gareth’s eyebrows had risen. He had realized that Alex and Alan were rivals as much as they were friends—he had encouraged such competition between the lads as it made both of them hungry, fed their ambitions—but he had never heard that precise note of jealousy in Alex’s tone before as if Alex suspected and resented that Alan got different instruction. 

“You are.” Alex’s answer had contained more than a trace of impatience. “I’m repeating what Alan told me you said and wondering why your advice to him is different than it is to me.” 

“That should be straightforward enough for you to figure out yourself.” Gareth’s mouth had thinned. “Would you try to fence like Gary or Raoul?” 

“No.” Alex had bit his lip as if sensing a trap he couldn’t evade. “I’m not built like them, Your Grace. I have to rely on speed and agility, not size and strength.” 

“Temperaments guide fighting technique almost as much as build,” Gareth had explained. “Anger drives Alan but it distracts you.” There had still been shadows lurking in Alex’s gaze so Gareth had added dryly, “Do you distrust my wisdom, lad?” 

“I don’t question your knowledge, Your Grace,” Alex had replied after a hesitation. “It’s only that if I were King’s Champion, I’d never teach any of my students everything. I’d always keep my most important secrets in reserve so they wouldn’t be able to defeat me.” 

“Sometimes knowledge is increased by sharing it, not hoarding it like a squirrel would acorns.” Secrets, leverage, high ground: those were all concepts Alex had grasped instinctively, but the benefits of trusting and confiding in others had always seemed to elude him. Attempting to address Alex’s mathematical mind, Gareth had continued, “Knowledge is infinite. It’s not limited in supply. Our own can grow when we give it to someone else. I’m a sharper fencer because I fight with you and Alan every day. Competing with young blood every day keeps me on my toes.”

Flexibility, control, and sharing knowledge, Alex had learned none of that, and, in the end, the ignorance had killed him.) 

“I tried to teach him so much.” Gareth was in Wyldon’s office again, discussing failure and loss. “He wouldn’t listen.”

“You taught me many lessons.” There was a stiff sincerity to Wyldon’s words. Expressing emotions didn’t come naturally but he tried to be unflinching when stating them, resulting in an awkwardness that could be touching in its own fashion. “I’m grateful and unworthy.” 

“You were never unworthy.” Gareth had smiled slightly. At the beginning, Wyldon’s had been the most talented boy, but he had always been staunch in fulfilling his duties and unsparing of himself in service of others. In the end, that was what made him a hero. “I know you think you failed, and nothing I say will convince you otherwise, but if you’ll suffer through a reminder: failure doesn’t have to break us. It can remake us. You’re resigning. A perfect opportunity to begin again.” 

“With respect, sir, I’m getting old for new beginnings.” Wryly, Wyldon’s glance flicked down to the shoulder that had been savaged by hurrocks when he rescued Gareth’s great-nephews and great-niece. 

“We’re never too old for new beginnings.” Gareth’s knees protested as he pulled himself upright with his cane. He was closer to inhabiting a crypt than he wanted to think but at least he would be reunited with his dear sister Lianne soon. Perhaps they would run through the Peaceful Realms together, breath never fading and strength never failing. The image inspired him as he started his journey toward the door. 

Remembering the last tournament he had watched and the respect Wyldon had shown the girl he had once threatened to resign over, Gareth turned before he reached the threshold. “The Mindelan girl jousts like you.” 

“She jousts like Lord Raoul,” countered Wyldon, but there was something bordering on pride in Wyldon’s gaze. All teachers wanted to believe that they had passed along an enriching legacy to the next generation that would survive when everything else was lost. “By that, I mean with her shield an inch too low. I told her that last time we tilted. If she fixes that, then I’ll say she jousts like me.” 

“She must be a favorite of yours if you’re willing to think of extending her such a compliment.” Gareth was pleased that his vision remained as shrewd as ever. Maybe he wasn’t as near death’s door as he imagined, always a cause of optimism and renewed vigor. 

“Not always but now.” Wyldon paused and then asked, “Is it so obvious?” 

“Only to me.” Gareth could spot what it took another former training master to notice. “Now that you’re retired from the post of training master, you may find yourself freer to show affection to your favorites, because Mithros knows we all have them even if we aren’t supposed to.” 

“In the beginning, I didn’t treat her fairly or honorably so I couldn’t fault her if she hated me.” Wyldon hitched his good shoulder in a shrug. “I’m content if she accepts that I don’t spend every waking moment plotting her downfall.” 

“Everyone should hate their training master at some point.” Gareth chuckled. “Otherwise the training master hasn’t done his duty.” 

“We wouldn’t want Mindelan to miss out on that tradition.” Wyldon spoke dryly, and Gareth knew that his work in this office was done.


End file.
